Blogging on Azure Stuff

This week we had a very useful side effect of using the Window Azure Service bus. We have an Azure hosted website that connects to a CRM backend using the service bus in relay mode to communicate between the two systems. We had a test system that worked fine but when we moved to a Live system we had a configuration error in one of the systems but it was difficult to identify.

The way the service bus works means that the server can easily be moved (as long as the server has an outgoing internet connection).Our service bus at the server side is a Windows Service but we also have a console application to help us with debugging as all the traces are logged to the console window. We turned off the service on the Live system and started it on the test system. As the Azure hosted website is connecting to the service bus rather than a specific server the website will now connect to our test system. By running a successful connection test on the Azure hosted site we could prove that the Azure website configuration was correct.

The next change was to configure the test system to point to the Live CRM system. This would prove whether our data was correct or not. Running the same test as before proved that our data migration to the Live CRM system was fine.

This left us with the service bus and the business logic web service running on the test system, so we reconfigured the Live service bus service to point to the Test web service (which we had previously configured to connect to the live CRM system) and this also work. Thus proving we had an issue with the business logic service.

What we were able to do then was to move the service bus console application on to a developers machine and run it in Visual Studio so that we could debug and break on the calls to the business logic service which helped us to easily identify the problem. All this was done without needing to reconfigure or redeploy our Azure hosted website.

I wish I could say that this ease of debugging was one of the reasons we chose to use the service bus, but I would be lying. The fact that it has made our debugging so much easier will now have an influence on its future use.